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Comment by rofo1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can't you just hire the right person for the job?

To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people.

Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing is crunching the numbers to "make it work on paper".

Are women or black or whatever group we discuss equally represented across all jobs across the whole universe, everywhere?

It's a ridiculous concept, I don't understand who came up with it.

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It's an awkward, overly simplified attempt to correct systemic errors.

There is reason to believe that women, people of color, etc are unfairly kept out and it does great harm to their lives (and has other undesirable consequences). We mostly don't know how to remedy that, so we come up with some cludgy thing like "Let's set a goal of hiring more women" instead of looking for a more elegant solution.

Unsurprisingly, it tends to not work all that well. Then you get articles like this one trying to explain the failure, in essence.

Edit: The Rooney Rule is the only elegant solution I've really seen for systemic bias in hiring. The NFL requires teams to interview people of color who apply for certain positions because they determined that the bias in their pipeline was pre-interview stage. It did wonders to improve the numbers without setting a quota.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

It's abuse of statistics to fabricate a nonexistent problem. People do it because it works so well and is so easy. Everybody wants to help women and "marginalized groups". So with some superficial, misleading statistics, you can attract attention, money and hiring advantages. Why wouldn't people do it? (I mean campaigning for those parity goals. Why companies chose to try to comply is probably simply PR, and the hope to be able to hire cheaper developers).

Look into "unconscious biases"

Basically, someone similar to you will naturally seem like a better and more skilled person

Unconscious bias has been debunked.

> I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group.

Because humans are biased.

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